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I walked in the suburbs, far from home and without coat or umbrella, and there came a cloudburst. Across the road was a bus shelter – one of those enclosed on nearly all sides – and I dived inside to escape the falling water. There was no one else there – and so to a post that might have been entitled 10 Minutes in a Bus Shelter. Well, you know, I was standing there, with interesting things to look at all around – the misty windows, the gleaming streets outside, the patterns on the floor, the metal struts framing the translucent perspex, the bright red seat, you name it – and I had a camera burning a hole in my pocket.
That’s one thing about photography really, if you get right into it, nowhere is visually boring, there are always things to stare at – and in this case, unless I fancied a drenching, I had the leisure to stare.
So, what to stare at? Two worlds. First, the confined, almost claustrophobic world of the shelter, distorted slightly by the TG-5’s wide lens – misted windows, patterned floor and red seating: bland, functional modernity, purposely designed for the have’s in our society who catch the buses, and equally purposely designed to offer little comfort for the have-not’s who have nowhere else to go and would like somewhere other than the shelter’s cold floor to sleep on. And here we all were, at the start of November, gearing up for The Season of Goodwill. But then, the bus shelter is in the real world, whereas The Season of Goodwill is only in our minds.
And the second world, the outside world, the view out through the shelter’s ever-open doorway: a view to wet pavements, a passing car and, in the background, an equally passing factory. But, you say, how can a factory possibly be passing? Well, I’m a geologist and to me everything is passing, but it is apparently the case that this old factory is on a site earmarked for hundreds of new houses; we shall see.
So I loitered there, looking at anything and everything, taking it all in. And two women passed, better equipped for the weather than I. And, whispering together, they gave me a long, suspicious look. I imagined their conversation: “Here, what’s that strange old man doing in that bus shelter? Do you think he’s a prevert?” (she’d been watching a Dr Strangelove rerun). “Well, I expect he’d say its artistic, but I’m not so sure …”. Actually I’ve got that quote wrong, because the most used words in our new, Politically Correct society are appropriate and inappropriate, and I have a feeling that, in their eyes, I’d have merited the latter.
But, nobody expects the unexpected, I do think. And, as Bob Dylan might put it, “”You can be in my bus shelter if I can be in your’s …” .
The first image in the Outer Suburbs series, with context, is here: 1 . Subsequent images are here: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 53a 55 56 57 58 59 60 . Each will open in a separate window.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it – recommended.
Technique: TG-5 at 25mm (equiv); 800 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid film simulation; south Bristol; 1 Nov 2018.
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